A Short Story by Ravi Kumar Pillai
Scaria Thomas was awakened by the announcement of the impending landing and the brightening of the cabin lights. He had a restless sleep in the four hours of flight from Dubai. He had arrived from Toronto around midnight, at the end of a non-stop long-haul flight. There was just enough time to freshen up and have a strong coffee, before he rushed to the boarding gate, half delirious from the backlog of disturbed sleep, to catch his connection to Kochi.
As the aircraft soared through the starlit night sky of Dubai, with city lights spread like a luminous carpet down below, he looked aimlessly through the window pane. In the headlight of the ascending aircraft, the nebulous mist which the sky bird was piercing seemed like a bunch of frittered cotton lumps.
He grew up in a rustic village, nestled in the folds of the Western Ghats. He was Mama's boy all the way, with only hazy memories of his father, a casual visitor who occasionally dropped in for a few days and then disappeared into the wilderness. As he grew up into his teens, he heard stories of his father having a live-in relationship with a woman in the distant Wayanad village to which he had migrated in search of cultivable land that was up for grabs. Thomas was among the many settlers in the forest and government land. His mother had opted to stay back in the village to which she had come to live upon her marriage.
He remembers his mother, sister and self, warmly huddled under a blanket to beat the wintry chill, in the dim light of a kerosene lamp. His journey to Dubai courtesy of a distant relative, his struggle to get a job as tally clerk in a construction company and the elation he felt when he could enroll his sister in her nursing course are all fresh in his mind.
His life took an unexpected turn when he sensed a growing intimacy with his colleague, Maria, a petite Filipino girl. Their closeness grew into a strong bond, which ended in their marriage in the local parish, attended only by a handful of colleagues and friends. Without anyone from back home in the know, they became man and wife, clinging to each other in the clumsy bed in his small attic.
A disturbing feeling of guilt in depriving his mother of the opportunity to live the moments of her son’s nuptials in their native parish troubled Scaria momentarily. His struggles to find his moorings in the rough and tough alien settings had hardened him so much that he brushed aside the invading nostalgia and self-deprecation as unwarranted and flimsy.
When he called to break the news to his mother, she said with stoic indifference, “So be it, this is what Jesus willed”. When his sister graduated from nursing school and was recruited through an agent to work in a hospital in faraway Ireland, he felt fulfilled as a brother and as a son. In a couple of years, she too found a partner, a male nurse, from a neighbouring village who too was working in Ireland.
“Where we are born, who our parents are, how we come through our childhood are all just stepping stones to becoming what we are destined to be”, he was amazed by his ability to be detached and dispassionate about life.
“Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.” Proverbs 19:21
He quietly acquiesced to Maria’s desire to migrate to Canada and settle down there to build their future and their children’s just the same way the sparrows assemble their nests away from the din and dangers of native terrain.
He never took his wife and the two children home, not even to let his mother caress the grandchildren and hold them close to her bosom for once. The mother never complained.
He had been to their native village only on a few occasions in all these years, his mother’s funeral being the last time. He could feel a remoteness and cold indifference on either side in the sparse encounters he has had. With mother’s death, the last of the tenuous links he had with the family and neighbourhood disappeared forever. Much before that, he had arranged for the transfer of the only property they had, the house and the twenty cents of land in which it stood in the name of his sister. He learnt later that she sold the land off to an anonymous new settler.
Ronnie was the only school buddy with whom he had a surviving friendship, that he had tended to through a call now, an email then and a Christmas Wish on odd festive days. He was a practising lawyer in the district courts and has been Scaria’s points-man to sort anything out locally.
Last month Ronnie wrote him an unusually pontificating mail. Through his sources, he came to know that the old man, Thomas, owned a plantation, more than ten acres in area, in remote Wayanad. A well-developed farmland, with an enviable yield of commercial crops, the property was in the custody of the woman who was the live-in partner. Thomas passed away a couple of years back and Scaria, though informed by Ronnie, had chosen to remain aloof and absent at the funeral.
Ronnie advised him to claim his inheritance and sell the same to raise a good amount that he could remit to Canada. “Not claiming what is due and legitimate would be callousness and dereliction of duty to self and your family”, the advisory stressed. Ronnie wanted a go-ahead so that he could organize the documentation and advise him when to come down to have the deal done. He even identified a prospective buyer for the property so that the sale would be smooth and early.
Maria in her soft and subtle undertone pushed him to look at the situation with calmness and composure. “Here you are face to face with the legacy, the physical acquisitions, the fruits of hard labour of the man who brought you forth. The legacy deserves respect and attention that is your obligation, however detached, indifferent or hostile the relationship had been”.
That is how, at the end of all the introspection and self-debate Scaria decided to fly down and take ownership and possession of his dad’s property, which he had never stepped on. He had a nagging doubt if Thomas Sr. would have willed it to him, had he been alive.
On arrival at Kochi, Scaria checked into the hotel booked. In the morning, he and Ronnie drove down to the property, a full three hours-plus journey through winding roads through undulating terrain. He wanted to have one look at the property that would be his, albeit for a few hours more, till the transfer proceedings at the registry to sign it off to a stranger.
They reached the place around noon and the scorching Sun belied the hilly terrain and elevation of the place. A young man, apparently on a mid-day break from his farming routines, with a weather-worn look and biceps toned up by hard labour welcomed them with a curious unfamiliarity on his face. Scaria was taken aback for a moment by the stark similarity of the guy to himself in his youthful days.
In a few moments, he was sitting by the side of the old and weak figure, who was the vilified ‘other woman’ of whom he had a sketchy and loathsome impression through the stories and gossip of heard.
People are the outcomes of their circumstances. Who are we to pass judgements on someone who would have gone through contexts and compulsions alien to our impulsive stereotyping?
When the frail woman stroked his hands, embraced him and kissed him on his head, he felt the same comforting feel that his mother's caressing and cuddling gave him as a child. He thought for once that this woman and her child would have lived through the detached and cold presence of a father figure, while he and her sister had their mother’s wholesome affection all to themselves.
On the way back, he brooded over the long-postponed encounter that just got over, leaving a nagging sting on his conscience. As the cab wobbled through the sharp bends and steep slopes, he told Ronnie, “Let us cancel the meeting with the prospective buyer. I want you to make out a gift deed to transfer the plantation to this anonymous brother of mine. He is the rightful owner of this land on which our dad toiled hard. He will tend the land just the same way Dad would have done for years.
They decided to meet a month later when he would fly in to close the chapter that his dad left unfinished.
It will truly be a son’s bequeathal to the sketchy memories of his father.
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